Global Securities Information urges the Commission to continue
requiring the filing of Financial Data Schedules (FDS) as
exhibits to Form 10-K and 10-Q.

While the existing FDS is admittedly imperfect, it is the most nearly
uniform of the disclosure documents currently required of public
companies.
It is the only place where investors can currently find financial
information on a consistent basis, in a consistent format.

The elimination of the FDS will negatively impact the individual investor
as
their are a number of public access sites such as CNN FN, 10KWizard,
Spredgar, and Edgarscan that allow the individual investors to look at a
snapshot of a
reporting company's financial health, at no cost, without reading through
thousands of pages of financial information.

If anything, we feel that the FDS items should be expanded for further
clarity and completeness. If done properly, individual investors would be
able to summarize a public company's health quickly and accurately, as the
1940 Act rules allow with summary prospectus information. Less disclosure
in this area is a step backward, not forward.

The Financial Data Schedule represents the area of EDGAR where the
Commission comes closest to its goal of providing uniform disclosure to
the
investing community. Shortcomings in the existing process should be
addressed by enhancing the FDS rather than eliminating it.

EdgarScan, a web
application that attempts to extract financial information from
10-K's and 10-Q's, has shown us how hard this is and how important
it is to have a reliable FDS section. EdgarScan processes millions
of requests monthly and has a wide user base both in the corporate
and academic worlds.

There are certain things in the FDS that are simply not available
elsewhere in the filing, such as <FISCAL-YEAR-END>. When
EdgarScan fails to extract information from tables it will try to
find the information in the FDS. Although filers often do not fill
out the FDS accurately, it is much better than reliance upon what is
generally not there.

We think something more comprehensive should be put into place such
as an extensible electronic vocabulary for EDGAR filings using a
taxonomy such as
XFRML.